feeling more human
by BiblioMatsuri
Summary: "Functional" is a good word for it, for her. / Monty Oum Project prompt: "Yang with a fully robotic arm that is also ember celicia. Bonus points if it's about her building it." Title from Seafret "Angel of Small Death & The Codeine Scene" (Hozier cover). Warnings: Mild gore (because backwoods surgery) and occasional swearing. Spoilers through Volume 3.
Her temp teammates still sometimes drag the topic of conversation around to the big surgery, with all the subtlety of a bunch of angry Ursa. Yang loudly says she misses painkillers.

Well, no. She never liked how they made the world go damp and fuzzy all over, how it was like fifty layers of too-thick blankets under her skin _all the time_ until the damn things wore off, and how hard it was to give a shit when she was on anything strong enough to actually block pain.

Meaning, she's actually really really into how easy it is to just exist and not face the world when she's on mind-altering drugs; but, she can't afford to spend her whole life drowning in a bottle. Pills just make it harder to get a fix, compared to the crap two steps up from gutrot Uncle Qrow drinks usually. Weiss says things like "addictive personality" and gets huffy and threatens to narc on Yang – which would be hilariously weak, except she says she'll tell _Ruby_ , and Yang doesn't want to know if she can take Ruby looking at her the way Ruby looks at Qrow three days into a bender.

(That's a blatant lie! Ruby had that exact look day-in-and-day-out back at Dad's, when Yang was ""recovering"" from that terrible ordeal. Stewing in her failure. Waiting to die.

Being honest with herself is an uphill battle, full of thorns and memories like minefields.)

Yang is up to it, though. Yang had damn well better be up to it, after spending the entire fucking fall (ha ha ha, made a funny) slowly rotting, like she was already dead when Ruby was right there and begging for help-

Fuck this. No. She's not getting lost in her own stupid circular downward-spirals of guilt and self-accusation, and she is not going to let a little thing like utter failure keep her from saving her sister! Ruby _needs_ a Yang who can fight, who can be relied on to watch everyone's backs like she's freaking supposed to, so that's who Yang is going to be!

Hell yeah.

Yang forces herself not to fidget. Fails at that, too, so she settles for foot-tapping so at least all this fruitless nervous energy will be out of the way.

She lines up her stump-arm with the yawning gap of circuitry on the counter. They're in a bar, funny enough – it's a crappy little building, basically a ruin, only still standing because the Grimm haven't gotten this far yet, and the looters haven't gotten the idea to burn the place yet. Nora is on fire watch, because Nora can sort-of freaking fly, so she's the best at finding decent vantage points after Ruby.

Ruby is too nervous to do shit right now, so she's sitting in a corner pretending to go through the half-assed censored-to-hell "reports" Uncle Qrow occasionally deigns to send on to the remaining Beacon kids. There's a settlement with a halfway-qualified doctor less than two minutes' travel as the little dork flies, but that's not even going to come up, come on. Ruby's awesome big sis is about to become 120% more awesome.

Ha.

Jaune is doing a statue impression at the "door" (the biggest hole in the wall) and Weiss is hiding again because Weiss' father is a stone-cold shithead who doesn't deserve a kid as loyal as she is.

Yang is sitting on a bar stool, trying to look cool. The irony is exhausting.

Ren raises the knife (thoroughly and repeatedly sterilized, as of two minutes ago) and asks again. "You're sure?"

Yang doesn't kick him, but she knows he's good enough to spot that leg-twitch and the minute shifting of her weight. She's braced. "Get it the hell over with, buddy."

He doesn't stop to nod, or smile, or say something cheesy to try to take the edge off her boiling-over nerves. There's a lump of (arm) meat on the drop-cloth and she's shoving the edges of the sleeve over the raw stump – has to hurry, before the shock fades enough for her to process the ridiculous amounts of pain that come with losing body parts an fuckfuckowdamnit – checking the connections one by one, making sure all the ports are where they should be, Ren's dead-steady hand holding up what feels like two tons of metal dragging at raw flesh. Moment of truth.

She pulses her aura into the prosthetic, and the air is cold in her

She's not sure if she screamed...

The answer is 'duh'. Amateur backwoods surgery without anaesthetic _sucks_ even when it's something as simple as stitches, never mind attaching a whole new goddamn limb. Logically, losing a limb in the first place should have gotten more of a reaction than total apathy for – who cares how long?

Damn it.

The good news is, she's finally installed the prosthetic. (With Ren's help, because Ruby would _not_ have had steady hands for this.) So, is it too much to ask for one day ( _one day_ ) without pain?

She's already burned a month just _designing_ and patching together her new arm, from practically scratch. Uncle Qrow was no help, even though he's the fiddly technology expert in the family (as opposed to Ruby the baby genius). Yang's never really thought of herself as book-smart, but she knows that knowing how to repair (and replace) her weapons is beyond priceless, so she learned. (Which would be why her new right arm is bright-ass yellow-on-black, with red decals because why not?)

The project needed powdered Dust, specifically. The raw crystals were too big, too prone to irregular output, and Dust rounds ran out of charge and had to be discarded. Weiss turned out to be kind of freakin' perfect – she snuck top-secret plans out of her dad's company / school / military installation! That takes serious guts. Weiss could get into her father's factories, no problem; but, if she suddenly took out a large quantity of Dust then ""questions"" would be asked, and then Weiss wouldn't be on the inside anymore, and that all got blown out of the water _anyway_ when the whole Mistral thing came out.

All those supplies – letters, weapon parts, small vials of Dust in hidden compartments – wound up in the living room _in Patch_ for Dad to trip over in the morning, between him getting back from wherever and her never leaving the house. Qrow's network was actually kind of useful, for once? Whoo.

Yang had almost-halfway wondered who managed to teach Weiss how to get sneaky. Then she remembered who was #3 on her speed dial, right below Ruby and after Dad, and shut right back down for half the day.

Yang's not mad. She didn't have the emotional resources for _mad_ then, and she can't even catch up to herself yet, so.

So.

Yang built the thing; reverse-engineered it from Penny's blueprints, and left the movement stuff to Ruby while she dealt with the extra-super-fiddly Dust-powered biotech part of it. It'll run on tiny amounts of Dust now, with her aura into it, but attacks are going to drain her aura fast until – well, until.

She's pretty sure in hindsight that she was in shock, when it happened, but after? All she knew was that it sucked, that she sucked, and that the 'why's were so obvious that thinking about them was stupid. It just keeps being stupid no matter how she thinks it over, but thinking didn't stop her from spending half a damn year marinating in sick-sweat and failure. Going over those same few seconds again and again, fire and darkness and white and then pain, and no Blake and no Ruby and- and the hell with that!

And she might still be loopy from the whole 'just attached a new _arm_ ' thing.

Yang tries to get off the damn stool for the tenth time, and for the tenth time, Ren calmly pushes her back down. Ruby has her good shoulder, the one where the muscles haven't completely worn away from not moving for too-many months, gripped tight in one pale hand. If Yang looks over her shoulder, she'll see veins on Ruby's hand, bruises under Ruby's eyes, a smile as fake as hers is.

"I have to get up," she says. To Ruby, to Ren, to the cooling air.

Ren shakes his head. Ruby answers that she has to rest, "you stupid brilliant dummy!"

Ruby's voice sounds like crying. Yang doesn't turn her head, doesn't shift her hair out of the way with her whole arm so she can see. She _knows_.

She has to be better.

She's got a brand-new arm, to begin with, and it might even be better than the old one! So what if there's hardly any sensory input? She's got pressure and temperature to go with her fighting style and her Semblance, and she's got little warning lights to go off instead of pain receptors, and she can totally juggle a few apples to make Ruby feel better about "not being able to help any more."

Like getting the designs (for the interface that let Yang's new arm channel her aura so well) was nothing, like reverse-engineering this crap (from the body of her dead robot friend) was no sacrifice at all. _Damn it_ , Ruby...

Yang closes her eyes for a second. That just makes the pain come back sharper, so she snaps back into the waking world and forces herself back into the now: Floorboards covered in sticky stains, bar counter digging into her right side, evening sunlight bleeding into dull orange. The days are starting to get longer. There's less snow.

Yang knows how direct sunlight off any surface with a high refractive index can make you go blind, but does thin sunset light carry the same risk? She knows it goes orange, the patchy snow on the ground and in the trees and up on the roof gleaming microscopic mirrors.

Sunsets in city areas less pristine than old Vale are both dimmer and more vivid than anywhere else she's been, which is pretty much the inevitable result of too many people and too many fires putting too much smoke and crud into the air. She hopes they choke on it.

Nora (finally) comes crashing back to their shelter for the night. They're not dumb enough to stay in unprotected human-built anything normally, but Yang knows she can't walk yet. It doesn't mean she can't curse out her traitor body in every dialect she even remotely knows, but there you go!

Jaune, predictably, comes sidling into the room trying to hide an oilpaper-wrapped packet under his arm. Honestly, she knows JN_R and Ruby are taking orders from Qrow now (in Ozpin's "absence") but apparently it has to be this whole big _thing_ just because she didn't go along to their big exciting Mistradventure. She doesn't actually care whose orders are in those quote "official top-secret super-special communiques" as long as they don't say anything stupid like: _Stop looking_.

Fuck that.

There's a bottle of something greenish in front of her, labeled in Ren's neat calligraphy. Yuck, no, she is not that desperate-

Okay, she is. It tastes exactly as horrible as she expected of one of Ren's special recipes. On the other hand, now she's too grossed out to think about _ow_ fuck _Nora_ -

And. Great. Now she's covered in vomit, on her hands and knees, on the puke-covered floor. She's not sure if it's made worse or less-worse by how little she managed to choke down for lunch.

Yang lurches to her feet, wiping her hands off on her stockings. She doesn't care, she's still got a spare set in her bags and there's a working well-hole not too far from

here

 _ **hands**_

She's – fuck everything at once, she's shaking, she doesn't even care, the join where her fake arm meets her damaged body hurts like hell but her fingers move. She can make a fist, she can punch a goddamn hole in the floor.

She can strain barely-set connections and risk it healing wrong and scare the crap out of her sister and new temp-team, like an idiot. Way to go, Yang.

"Yang?"

Oh, hell. Ruby's voice is shaking.

Yang looks her in the eye, because Ruby stayed in case something went wrong, in case someone needed to run and try to find help – Yang owes her this. "Yeah, Rubes?"

Ruby raises the hand not clenched around some useless papers, her nails tearing through half the stack (not that she's noticed it) and draws some shapes in the air. "I.O.U. one hug, okay? The literal second you're not all gross and vomit-y, I swear!"

Yang, um. She tries to process that.

She defaults to sarcasm. "Gee, thanks! I always wanted to know I was too gross to touch-"

Aaaaand Yang is the center of a three-way hug consisting of Ruby and Nora. Jaune and Ren get dragged in somehow. Everything is gross and ridiculous and if her eyes start to water, that's entirely Jaune's fault for jostling her bad arm. She's not okay with this.

Ruby tucks her head under Yang's chin, on the bad side, the side that's actually kind of clean still because _no contaminating the injury_. Aura helps just slightly more than jack-all once something's gotten in past the skin.

Yang closes her eyes, just for now.

Two hours later, they're all fleeing a ghost town being wrecked by Grimm. Nora is half-asleep still, Ren is cranky, and the kids are arguing about who got the final blow in on that Alpha Beowolf.

Yang pounds her fists together, and everything left of that ruined settlement: the dirty streets, the dusty rooms, the sticky-stained floor of the one still-standing bar – a lump of cloth, soaked through with dark-dried blood and stuff – it all burns.

She's alive. She's living. And one of these statements is untrue.

On their fourth night in the city of Vale, Yang visits the memorial alone. It's a plain, simple thing – a block of stone, roughly cut into the shape of an upright grave marker.

The team already went. Jaune first, alone, for obvious reasons. Ren and Nora joined him later, and dragged him off to go eat something. Travel food still tastes a lot like salted cardboard, but they don't have money for real food (because rationing sucks) and the kiddies – Ruby, Jaune, and pretty often Nora but not in this case – are too moral to steal ...unless they're really hungry and there's some fat-looking rich person who can spare a few meals.

Ruby slept the last night over, watching the memorial from under a flimsy canopy, hiding from the rain. It never seems to stop raining, and Yang wants to laugh, because whatever happened to the pretty Beacon she remembers?

Maybe Probably it was never real anyways.

Yang runs a hand through her hair – the left, she's already gotten out of the habit of not using her right arm, which she's now got to train herself out of – and walks up to the tiny courtyard. There's grass, the stone, and a lot of weeds. Not a lot of upkeep.

It's a vacant lot, really. The one side that doesn't run up against a building is half-heartedly fenced in with what looks like chicken wire. It takes absolutely no effort for Yang to hop the fence, even with her balance all borked-up by atrophied muscles on the one hand and heavy metal on the other. Yang can always laugh at her own jokes, even when no one else does.

There's someone on the roof at her right-hand side, laughing with her.

* * *

She doesn't look away from the roughly-carved stone, from the emblem of Beacon charred into the flattest side. Yang raises her Dust-and-metal arm, curls her hand into the shape of a heart, and smiles at no one.

She didn't bring offerings.

When she looks up, no one's there.


End file.
